Archive for the ‘war’ Category

The Navy just doesn’t understand SWOs

Posted: February 25, 2023 by navygrade36bureaucrat in Uncomfortable Truths, war
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GULF OF OMAN (Feb. 20, 2023) The guided-missile destroyer USS Paul Hamilton (DDG 60) approaches the dry cargo and ammunition ship USNS Alan Shepard (T-AKE 3) in the Gulf of Oman, Feb. 20, 2023. Paul Hamilton is deployed to the U.S. 5th Fleet area of operations to help ensure maritime security and stability in the Middle East region. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Elliot Schaudt)

Surface Warfare Officers (SWOs) have been a part of the Navy since…always. Our Navy started out on surface ships, and surface warfare continues to be important, no matter what an Aviator, Submariner or SEAL will tell you. Yet increasingly I have to wonder, does the Navy understand why it is so hard to keep SWOs? You would think with hundreds of years of history this would be obvious, but given its latest actions, I’m not so sure, because the US Navy is facing a SWO manpower crisis, and is dealing with it in ways that simply won’t work.

Let’s go back to my original rules for Navy manpower. When times are good and we have too many Naval Officers, the Navy does the following:

  1. Kick people out for failing physical fitness tests, even if they are otherwise good Sailors
  2. Make it hard to get waivers for things like antidepressants and other medical issues
  3. Begin nicely asking older Naval Officers to retire to make space for younger officers
  4. Lower the number of Officer Candidate School admissions
  5. Reduce bonuses
  6. Make life increasingly difficult, so that more people naturally quit
  7. Conduct a Reduction In Force (RIF) and simply remove people

This is a pretty good strategy to reduce numbers, slowly ratcheting up the pressure to ensure we don’t have too many officers hanging around. Naturally, if we have too few officers, the Navy turns this around by:

  1. Not kicking people out for physical fitness test failures
  2. Waiving darn near everything, from age to non-violent felonies
  3. Asking people to pretty-please stay around a few more years
  4. Opening OCS and other admissions
  5. Raising bonuses
  6. Make life better for officers
  7. Reduce opportunities to leave early
  8. Op-Hold people

In the past, the Navy has done everything on the first list to bring down numbers. Now, they are doing…almost everything on the second list, but it’s not working, and it’s becoming glaringly obvious in the SWO community. If you listen to Admirals speak (and I don’t recommend that), you would think we’re doing OK on SWO retention. But a brief glance at the Health of the Force survey shows that disaster looms around the corner:

Future force structure increases outside the future year defense plan (FYDP) require DH billet increases, requiring increased retention. This compares unfavorably with a declining billet base across the FYDP as the Navy divests legacy platforms. Year groups 2015-18 require an average retention rate of at least 37.3%, exceeding the 10-year average. If fleet size projections remain accurate, Surface Warfare requires a retention rate of 44% in YGs 19-22 to meet future afloat DH requirements.

Health of the Force Survey

So we’re not making the retention rate we need now, and we have to increase this by 10 percentage points in the future, but retention is plummeting.

All the Manpower people in the Navy right now…

The Navy is already overlooking physical fitness failures, waiving medical conditions and opening up OCS admissions…which are now having a higher-than-expected failure rate. I would think most people would understand that lowering admission standards will likely lead to more failures in a difficult program, but apparently “most people” doesn’t include Navy HR.

So what to do next? Raise bonuses. And boy did they raise them.

NAVADMIN 045/23 discusses continuation bonuses for SWO Lieutenant Commanders (LCDRs). SWO leave after their first Navy tour at a fairly high rate, and it’s hard to persuade them to stay in long enough to promote to LCDR around their 8-9 year mark. So why not pay them $22K a year IF they stay in after promoting to LCDR? It’s certainly worth a shot.

NAVADMIN 046/23 establishes a payment schedule for SWO Department Head bonuses. If a SWO screens for Department Head and agrees to stay for two Department Head tours, they can get bonuses up to $105K in total over 6 years. Conveniently, that would put them right at the point of getting a continuation bonus as outlined previously.

Now, normally this would work. Throw enough money at people, and you can normally get them to stay. But it’s not going to do that, and the reason is hinted at in the Health of the Force Survey:

Improving retention requires a multi-pronged approach. First, community managers are allowing more individuals to lateral transfer and re-designate. This will divest end strength in year groups with smaller DH requirements, freeing inventory for future accessions. Second, several monetary and non-monetary efforts are underway to improve Surface Warfare retention. Surface Warfare Officers now have a career-long continuum of monetary incentives with the introduction of the SWO Senior Officer Retention Bonus (SWOSORB) in FY22. Third, the community offers improved education opportunities including: postgraduate education opportunities, tours with industry, and fleet-up options for increased geographic stability. Fourth, Surface Warfare recently modified the career path to incorporate multiple family planning opportunities for career-minded SWOs. Finally, SWO released the junior officer survey, senior officer survey, and junior officer exit survey to solicit retention feedback.

Health of the Force Survey

Two things stick out:

  1. Family Planning opportunities? I thought Navy was all about killing babies, or at least circumventing existing laws to do so? Guess that’s not so popular when retention is on the line?
  2. The Junior Officer Exit Survey results.

I’ve read the JO Exit Surveys. They’ve existed for years, and they say the same things over and over:

  • We don’t train people enough
  • The job is thankless and people treat JOs like dirt
  • JOs find Navy life is incompatible with having any outside life or family time

That’s every survey, ever. Pay doesn’t make the top three retention issues in almost any survey. In the past though, enough money would make people overlook how bad the job is. But when truck drivers make over $100K a year, or companies pay project managers $150K or more a year, that $105K spread out over 6 years starts to look really small. The Navy caps officer bonuses at $330K over a career. Civilian companies don’t. Pay isn’t going to fix this crisis.

The ONLY hope for retaining SWOs is to increase quality of life. This would mean closing the sea duty billet gap, addressing the shipyard maintenance problems, and make driving a warship fun again. These are all inside the Navy’s wheelhouse, but it seems increasingly incapable of taking these actions. I suspect that the top SWOs are looking down thinking “You young officers are pathetic, back in my day we worked 16 hour days on shore duty and we BEGGED FOR MORE!!!”

Given that pay won’t fix it, and Navy won’t address quality of life issues, I predict we get operational holds on people leaving in the next 6-12 months. I’d like to be wrong, and maybe next year you can repost this and laugh at me, but I have a bad feeling I’m right about this.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency. If you like this post, why not donate to DaTechGuy, or purchase one of the authors books?

We Interrupt Our Trump Series to note others are starting to feel a Draft coming our way

Posted: February 21, 2023 by datechguy in war
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For quite a while I’ve been the voice crying out in the wilderness suggesting the days of the draft were getting closer

Now others are not only seeing it but calling for it as well:

The Department of Defense in 2022 found that only 23% of people in prime military age (ages 17 to 24) qualify for service. Why so low? Obesity, drugs, mental/physical health, or a combination of these. Obesity is the largest single factor. 

To combat this trend, in 2022 the U.S. Army created two “prep-courses” that recruits can attend prior to Basic Training. One 90-day prep-course helps recruits meet body fat standards. The other course helps recruits achieve higher scores on the Armed Forces Qualifications Test. The U.S. Navy recently announced that it has raised its age limit to 41 years, the oldest of any service (thus far).  

This is sounding alarm bells. The recruiting pool is getting shallower.

There has been much discussion recently in how to fix this problem within the framework of the all-volunteer military. Perhaps it is time to put into action an old saying, “If you want a new idea, look in an old book.” 

Bring back the peace time draft. 

It’s interesting to note that Professor Szalma did not mention the really key thing that is hurting recruiting, the war on military members both from the forced jab and the forced wokeness to the point where you get this from military families:

Listening to friends, other vets, and fellow Marines, that has to be happening more often than not. When I pose that question, “Would you tell a kid today to go in/enlist?” the first exclamation out of their mouths rhymes with “duck” and is followed by an emphatic “NO!”

It is so toxic.

this of course wouldn’t be a problem if the military has a large pool of potential volunteers but as I wrote way back in 2006 commenting at Instapundit two years before I started blogging myself:

Since the 60′s two unifying forces, for good or ill, were removed from the country: the removal of Judeo/Christian values as the semi-official moral code of the public schools) and the death of the draft/aka Vietnam. (actually ending in the 70′s). These two changes had one thing in common, it took two generations for them to have the following effect:

It is now unlikely that a student going to school today, had a teacher or parent who 1. Served in the military or 2. Was taught that moral code in school. To a whole generation now being born these are things that belong to outsiders. This makes the military and religious people outsiders and strange to one group and vice versa. Since the military draws predominantly from those two groups it will become more isolated from the rest of the public as time goes by.

This is not healthy for our country. What is worse is that one group has slowly vilified the military assuming them to be all dupes or thugs. A lot of this was political rhetoric but it has grown as a matter of faith.

And remember that was written 17 years ago.

Bottom line if you have a small pool of volunteers that you counted on and after decades of vilifying them said pool finally tells their kids to avoid service what do you get?

A Draft to make sure those officers who towed the woke line their superiors have pushed since the days of Obama have someone to command.

On the question of the need for a draft Glenn Reynolds answers: “Well, No, but if he keep wrecking military recruitment through lousy management we may get one.” I disagree.

Unless by some miracle we get a GOP president willing to clean house both in the DOD and among woke officers from Major on up a draft is coming. Folks are now talking about it openly and I suspect we’ll see it happen before this decade is over.

I can’t wait to see the reaction of Portland Oregon & Seattle. It will soften the blow.

Closing thought #1 Since the congress never got around to making women eligible for the draft watch a bunch of blue state boys suddenly start defining themselves as women when it comes. Alas they’ll be surprised at how fast even Justice Brown figures out what a woman is and isn’t once the deep state decides they need the manpower.

Closing thought #2 If you thing Social Security is a budget buster wait a few decades after the return of the draft and 10-20% of the population rather than two is eligible for veterans benefits.

The Navy’s Health of the Force survey says we are…

Posted: February 18, 2023 by navygrade36bureaucrat in war
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Unhealthy.

I know you wouldn’t guess it by the cover pictured above. If you didn’t see “NAVY” plastered in the center, you could be forgiven for thinking this was referring to firefighters or some other group of people. More on that point later…

The Navy conducted a survey called the “Health of the Force” to gauge how well it was doing in the areas of Sailor retention, healthy behaviors, and other longevity areas that concern the “people” side of things. You can read the survey here. Full disclosure, I took this survey. If you’ve been following this blog for sometime, you can guess that the results of the survey reveal a Navy in trouble, especially in terms of recruiting, and well, the first major graphic of the survey sure seems to indicate just that.

Sailors increasingly think that the Navy isn’t committed to them? Even the surveyors agreed that “The negative trend for all four of these protective factors is statistically significant.” But wait, it gets worse. When Sailors were directly asked if they would stay in or get out of the Navy, we get these numbers…

Ouch.

In the course of five years, we went from over 60% of young men intending to stay to retirement to just under 40%. This is really bad considering that men make up about 80% of the Navy. Female retention is always difficult, because the Navy is not family friendly (no matter how often they lie to themselves about it), so women are often stuck between “Have a family” and “Have a Navy career.” Seems like many are increasingly picking the former.

So I wonder what happened in 2018 that caused this dip? The top reason people cited for staying in was “benefits.” Hmmm…didn’t we change the retirement in 2018? Didn’t someone blog about that and said it was a bad idea? Who could have seen that coming?

Nahh, I bet cutting retirement benefits had nothing to do with the young people deciding that the military wasn’t a good long term fit for them.

But at least we’re doing well in the DEI arena, with all our mandatory training, right?

Ouch. Now, these graphs look bad, but I noticed an interesting paragraph above them:

I’m wondering how much of the high number in the graph an aggregate of many smaller numbers. Like, if sexism is a “problem” in the Navy, is it a big or small problem? Is it better now than before? The survey text and the graphs shows very different results, so I think too much is aggregated to get the finer details. The reality is though that for all the focus on racism and sexism training, we don’t seem to be getting better, or at least we aren’t perceived as any better.

Same goes for suicide. For all the money spent on prevention, its not making a difference. Normally people are fired for this, but instead we’ll keep pouring money down a drain while young people continue to kill themselves.

Apparently Navy Sailors like using drugs that aren’t just alcohol…who knew! The rise in cannabis use will impact recruiting in two ways. First, you’ll have to issue more marijuana waivers to get otherwise qualified people to join. Second, if anyone wants an easy ticket out of the Navy, they can just smoke a few joints and pop positive on a drug test.

Long time readers will remember when I predicted that to make numbers, Navy would turn off all the “early out” taps, extend contracts, lower standards and throw money at the problem? Well, this survey confirmed all of that. Here’s a section from the “enlisted retention” portion:

Remember when the Navy made headlines saying they “made their recruitment numbers!” this past year, and I said that was a prop to hide a big problem? Well, I was right. The Navy drained its DEP numbers (essentially a reserve of Sailors signed up but waiting for boot camp) to make that short term goal. Now future Sailors “are shipped to boot camp withing weeks or even days of contracting to serve.” See below.

The officers are no better. Here’s a few snippets from various fields:

The last graphic sums it up the best.

If you can’t fully man, or overman, the billets that we have at sea, then you’re not doing your job. Has anyone been held accountable for this mess? It’s obviously been going on for a long time. Why was nobody fired?

Here’s the sad truth: Health of the Force told us that despite all the efforts of our “manpower heroes,” we still perceive ourselves as racist and sexist (and remember that perception doesn’t have to match reality), we emptied our coffers to keep people in, nobody wants to stay to retirement age, and we can’t man the most critical jobs we have.

It’s going to be a bad few years for the Navy until they figure themselves out.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency. If you liked this post, why not donate to DaTechGuy or purchase one of my books on Amazon?

Update (DTG) Instalanche: Thanks Glenn. Take a look around. If you like this piece you can find Ryan here and at Datechguyblog.org every Saturday. Catch you then

Full of hot air

Posted: February 4, 2023 by navygrade36bureaucrat in war
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High Altitude Balloon at the Natl Air and Space Museum Washington DC 11/13/2017

Balloons are nothing new. When I was stationed in Pensacola, I saw pictures of Naval Astronauts that went up in high altitude balloons to help us determine the effects that altitude would have on the human body. This helped us prepare astronauts on future space missions to safely live for extended periods at that altitude. Hot air balloons were used in warfare as far back as the U.S. Civil War. Heck, last year the U.S. was testing out steerable balloons off the coasts of California and North Carolina. So when China floated balloons out last year in international waters, it wasn’t a big surprise.

Flying a balloon 12 miles off the coast is fine, and we’ve been (mostly) consistent in our approach to accepting international norms on airspace and territorial waters. That’s why we don’t ram the Russian intelligence vessels that park off the coast in the Atlantic…or shoot across their bow, or any other nonsense that the crusty drunk guy at the bar will tell you we should absolutely be doing to maintain our honor as a nation…or something like that.

Oddly specific, I know, but I’ve had more than a few of those conversations.

But flying it over U.S. airspace? That’s a whole new level of brazen. I would be quite happy if we shot it down or otherwise captured it.

Do I think China would start WW3 over it? Nope. China will launch its war on its own terms. Yes, they would absolutely protest and try to impose consequences, but it wouldn’t involve WW3.

Why is China doing this? Intelligence from a camera or other devices is going to be better the lower in altitude you are, and balloons are far lower than satellites. But I think it goes further than that. China thinks it can get away with this violation. It’s not dissimilar to the U.S. driving two aircraft strike groups through the Taiwan Straits in 1995 as a response to China’s military exercises near Taiwan. The difference here is we never sailed in Chinese waters, but the balloons are obviously over U.S. territory.

What should our response be? It should have been to fire warning shots at the balloon when it crossed into airspace, give it a chance to leave, and if not, take it down as safely as possible. Following that, I propose hosting Japanese, Korean, Australian, Canadian and Taiwanese military leaders to discuss combining air space pictures to prevent this in the future. Since we already share air space pictures with each country in some way, getting them into a NORAD-like agreement in response to Chinese airspace violation is the perfect tit-for-tat response that would show real consequences to China’s military and government while not punishing the average Chinese citizen that doesn’t get much say in the matter.

What will actually happen? Nothing. The balloons will float away and the media will bury this story, like they buried the balloon story from last year. Unless a balloon hits a plane (unlikely) or malfunctions (I mean, it IS made in China!), there won’t be consequences for this at all, which will just encourage this in the future.

UPDATE: Well this post didn’t age well…two hours after posting and one balloon is shot down. Nicely done.

This post reflects the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

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